Twitter integration coming to Synergy?

Synergy is one of our favorite underappreciated features of webOS. It does such a good job of bringing everything into one place that we can’t help but forget about its seamlessness. But Synergy is a pretty passive affair – you can add contacts and calendar events and the like, but it all just syncs up into the cloud somewhere. There are a variety of sources currently available for Synergy, including accounts from Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Facebook. But not Twitter.

That could soon change, however, if some of the Twitter posts we’ve seen out of the webOS camp are any indication. Several HP employees recently posted onto Twitter somewhat innocuous posts and images, but what caught the eyes of their followers was the client used: “webOS Synergy.”

Like we said above, Synergy right now is a rather passive affair. There is no Twitter, which tells us that somebody in Sunnyvale has been working on integrating Twitter into webOS. Judging by the images we’ve seen posted – a relatively in-focus electric guitar and the water lily flower wallpaper from webOS smartphones older than the Pre3 (the Pre3 shared its wallpapers with the TouchPad, while everything up to the Veer shared a base set of wallpapers including the riverstones, water lily, and weird crab plant flower thing) – we’re guessing that this Twitter integration is coming to webOS smartphones. The TouchPad we’re not sure about (we doubt this has anything to do with the webOS 3.0.5 reports we’ve been seeing).

So just how could this hypothetical integration work? Probably something like the Twitter integration in Apple's iOS 5. There’s the ability to upload photos (and potentially video) directly from the Photos app and into the pic.twitter API, which no webOS app currently utilizes.

There’s also the ability to just post a message to Twitter, which in webOS would make the most sense integrated with Just Type as a Quick Action. This sort of status update is already available with the Facebook app for webOS, but it requires opening the app and submitting it yourself. Since this is billed as coming from “webOS Synergy,” it seems more like something integrated into the OS, perhaps without the need to confirm. Just type (ha), hit Send to Twitter, sit back and relax. This functionality exists already through the excellent Quick Post app.

There are other possibilities we haven’t seen exercised yet in the limited postings on Twitter. iOS 5 currently has Twitter integration available in Safari (for quickly sharing links), Maps (share your location), and YouTube (share that hilarious video). There’s even an API in iOS 5 that lets developers hook into the OS’ Twitter integration and share content from the app. Sure, plenty of webOS developers have worked together to share access between their apps, letting you send a post from Feeder to Carbon, but when the OS has an API available, it just makes things easier.

Yes, a good part of this post has been conjecture and assumptions (the paragraph preceding this one is practically a wish list), but it’s all within the realm of possibility. The only question left to be answered is how will we see this update happen? Our guess is not as an update to webOS on smartphones. HP’s all but abandoned their smartphones, but yet the development team is still working magic by adding Enyo to all the phones through a Trojan Horse Maps update. Could something similar be in store for adding Twitter support to Synergy? Could HP be releasing a Synergy Connector that adds Twitter support (and the first Synergy Connector at that)? Anything's possible at this point.